Burnt Shadows

by Kamila Shamsie

‘Modern India will start the day the English leave. Or perhaps it started the day we used their language to tell them to go home.’ Faintly,

eyebrows of officialdom that raised themselves

James’s aftershave entered the room, followed by the man himself.

fountain of lines springing out from the corner of his eyes as he smiled.

In talking to Lala Buksh, Sajjad realised that atrocities committed on Muslims touched him far more deeply than atrocities committed by Muslims – he knew this to be as wrong as it was true.

Women enter their husbands’ lives, Hiroko – all around the world. It doesn’t happen the other way round. We are the ones who adapt. Not them. They don’t know how to do it. They don’t see why they should do it.’

What am I holding on to? Just kite-strings attached to air at either end.’

not a gentle rain that whispered of harvest and bounty but a harsh, hammering rain. It fell like sheets of liquid steel, pounding all the life out of the tiny creatures in its path.

Monstrous watery shapes formed and disintegrated before Sajjad’s eyes as his tears splintered the rain. If he let go of Hiroko she would slip away in fluid form. Everything about her so precarious.

This final act of benevolent rule, against the tide of the Empire’s blood-soaked departure from India.

she had no interest in belonging to anything as contradictorily insubstantial and damaging as a nation

trying to run, convincingly scissoring her arms through the air but finding her legs had trouble understanding how to move at a pace brisker than a walk;

Hiroko shook her head reprovingly at the cracked skin of Sajjad’s heel, the dirt of the harbour that had lodged itself within each groove. ‘General manager of a soap factory!’ she scolded him, lifting his foot as he lay on the divan, and rubbing a wet cloth vigorously along the length of it before attending to the fissures at the heel. ‘And look at me, washing my husband’s feet. This is wrong, Sajjad Ali Ashraf. This is wrong.’ The last word was whispered, as though her voice itself had gone into retreat, unable to be present at this scene. She placed the foot gently down on the divan, which had been moved into the centre of the room to make it easier for her to walk around it and wash her husband’s corpse.

Americans, who were acting as though they owned a rainforest of money-growing trees.

Steve, stalking across the compound ground, thought sourly that they looked like a two-headed creature examining the world from the safety of a patterned cocoon.

‘You Americans have very timorous notions of craziness.’

He would have seen the desert as something other than a shore without a sea.

‘You just have to put them in a little corner of the big picture. In the big picture of the Second World War, what was seventy-five thousand more Japanese dead? Acceptable, that’s what it was. In the big picture of threats to America, what is one Afghan? Expendable. Maybe he’s guilty, maybe not. Why risk it? Kim, you are the kindest, most generous woman I know. But right now, because of you, I understand for the first time how nations can applaud when their governments drop a second nuclear bomb.’